Dr. Susan Laurance completed a PhD at the University of New England followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the NASA Large-scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in the Amazon (2002-2004) and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama (2004-2006). She is currently a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and has been a Tropical Leader and Senior Lecturer based at the School of Marine and Tropical Biology at James Cook University in Cairns since 2010.